[2] Among the writings published in LEF for the first time were Mayakovsky's long poem About This, and Sergei Eisenstein's The Montage of Attractions, as well as more political and journalistic works like Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry.

[citation needed] After Vladimir Lenin’s death on January 21, 1924, LEF’s first issue of the year dedicated its critical section to the Soviet leader (though the publication’s artistic prose and poetry were not Lenin-themed).

Vladimir Mayakovsky did, however, contribute an unsigned editorial to the issue, in which he criticized the newly-forming habit of Soviet authorities to “canonize” Lenin by mass-producing commercial objects with his portrait or likeness on them.

Their names and the titles of their works follow: All of these men either belonged to one of two Formalist collectives, OPOJAZ (The Society For the Study of Poetic Language) and the Moscow Linguistic Circle, or were associated with them.

[11] Since these authors share certain theoretical assumptions about language and rhetoric, moreover, the articles often overlap in the specific topics of their investigations, and produce a stable group of core conclusions about Lenin's style.

It emerges as early as 1916, in Viktor Shklovsky's manifesto “Art as Device.”[12] It is therefore unsurprising that several of the articles explain Lenin's ability to communicate ideas effectively, an end he achieved through successfully “defamiliarizing,” or disrupting, stale, established revolutionary language.

[20] Poetic devices in “prosaic” speech: Although the Formalists were sometimes accused by their opponents of being pure aesthetes, who were attempting entirely to separate art from reality,[21] their work on Lenin reveals that this charge was not entirely accurate.

Poetic speech is typified only by a particular attitude to discrete discursive elements and their specific use, especially in poetry.”[22] In this sense, the Lenin issue represents a turning point in Formalist thought.

Within the Soviet Union, it was received positively by the Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, who went on to write and publish his own analysis of Lenin's language in the following year, heavily citing the LEF critics in his work.

[26] More recently, Boris Groys mentioned the issue in his book The Total Art of Stalinism, claiming that it served as an example of how the Soviet avant-garde inadvertently helped canonize Lenin after his death.